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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 24, 2023

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You refuse to say «$username, I call you out on actually, secretly adhering to this ideology». But you always bring it up when arguing with any of us.

I refuse to say it because I don't think any of you are secretly adhering to an ideology you are not stating.

I do think most of you harbor a lot of racial ill-will, and you use HBD to justify it.

I will repeat to you what I've said to @The_Nybbler and @fuckduck9000 and several others, that I don't think you can actually describe my position with any accuracy, even though I do not think I have ever been ambiguous or evasive about what I think. I mean, not long ago you were claiming I was "anti-HBD," despite my years of commentary on the subject, and after I flatly told you you were wrong, you've shifted to another set of ill-fitting sentiments you are trying to force onto me. It is particularly absurd to me that you are trying to put me, @HlynkaCG, and @FCfromSSC into the same box. If there are three people on the Motte who represent three widely separated compass points, it's us.

Because if there is a difference in opinion, what do you think it is exactly?

In a nutshell, resentment and animosity, or lack thereof.

Do you think you deserve that treatment for believing the same things?

What "treatment" has anyone received from me, other than disagreement and (for the overt racialists) scorn?

I'm quite aware that most leftists would not see any difference between me, the HBD skeptic (that's in the literal sense) who accepts some of the claims, and the white supremacist who wants to ship 'em back to Africa, or anyone in between. What of it?

I just want to chime in to register myself as a HBDer with no "racial ill-will" I'm aware of - unless it axiomatically counts as racial ill-will if I tell a hypothetical poor and stupid $american_protected_group person something to the effect of "you are probably poor and stupid because your ancestors were", even if I would tell the same to a poor and stupid Caucasian-American - who finds this repeated attempt to associate us with white supremacists to be slanderous. The case that white supremacists are no true HBDers is very easy to make: the core blogs that defined HBD as a "movement" were generally obsessed with ethnic groups that outperform American whites, no doubt in a conscious effort to distance themselves from white supremacists, and I doubt you could a more unexpected cluster of people with detailed knowledge on the differences between the ethnic groups of Nigeria. The actual white supremacists on the Motte are easy to spot, because even if they borrow some HBD vocabulary for spice, they will always argue, as it says on the label, for the superiority of "white" ethnicities, making up fuzzy metrics like "creativity" or "morality", as happened in those anti-Chinese posts we kept getting for a while, to justify it on the fly. There is a good case to regard theories of group differences that seem optimised to flatter the speaker's group with skepticism, but for most speakers, HBD is not one of those.

I do think most of you harbor a lot of racial ill-will, and you use HBD to justify it.

In a nutshell, resentment and animosity, or lack thereof.

Thanks, this is sufficiently clear. It could only be better if you named names, instead of spreading this accusation thin on a group of people many of whom, I believe, do not materially differ from you in either opinion or feeling about race.

What "treatment" has anyone received from me, other than disagreement and (for the overt racialists) scorn?

Mealy-mouthed but persistent gaslighting about the nature of one's feelings and motivations with regard to the subject.